The nature of dual-language programs

[Kevin Rocap]

Dear friends,

I believe I should qualify what I wrote previously so as not to be
misunderstood nor to misrepresent issues.  When I mentioned that the
term "bilingual education" has been problematic and fraught with
political pitfalls, due to how it is respresented and understood at both
the policy/bureaucratic level and in the eyes of the general public, I
was speaking at a different level than how academics and savvy educators
use the terms (I tried, though perhaps unsuccessfully to make that
distinction in what I wrote ;-)).  And, in truth, the field in general
has gotten more careful with the terminology due, in part, I would
imagine, to a number of influences such as attacks on bilingual
education, shifts in policy contexts over the years and improvements in
the knowledge and articulation of the issues by researchers and
educational leaders in the field.

The former federal Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Languages
Affairs (OBEMLA) is now, of course, known as the Office of English
Language Acquisition (OELA), due to the political predilections of the
current administration.  But even the prior Office name, while I think
it is preferrable, would tend to mislead people into believing that all
programs supported by that office were "bilingual programs", when indeed
a significant number were ESL or ESOL programs.  And now, the opposite
is true, in that the new name obfuscates the number of funded programs
that are bilingual in nature.  And, even in New York State still, both
bilingual (as we're talking about them) *and* ESL/ESOL programs, as I
understand it, fall under the State Office of Bilingual Education not
the Office of Bilingual and ELL Education or Bilingual and ESL/ESOL
Education.  So, from the standpoint of policy rhetoric, bilingual and
ESL/ESOL programs still do get conflated as being somehow under the
umbrella of "bilingual education" (due to the historical association of
this term as applying to any program for qualifying language minority
students or "LEP" students).

I would suggest that that reality often affects the general public's
understanding of what "bilingual education" is, more than the
distinctions that we all make about program types, e.g., Transitional
Bilingual, ESL/ESOL, Dual Language, Two-Way, etc.  Though I think it is
VERY IMPORTANT to keep making those distinctions, to disseminate
information on the distinctions and thereby to better educate both the
public and policy-makers about the distinctions.  My point was simply
that many policy-makers and members of the general public, still don't
get that most so-called "LEP" students are not in, nor ever have been in
truly "bilingual" programs.  And so what general perception there is of
bilingual programs as "weak" programs is still a function of the fact
that issues of quality features of bilingual programs are not well-known
and distinctions between bilingual and ESL/ESOL approaches are not well
understood.

Even in my short time in New York I've run into a number of teachers and
administrators who blanche when I mention to them the value of
"bilingual education" for both language minority students and
English-speaking kids.  An immediate flag goes up in their head that
"bilingual education" means "remedial, low-quality" programs.  When I
probe their thinking about "bilingual programs", more often than not,
what they really have in their heads is an idea about a low-quality ESL
program, which they themselves associate with "bilingual education".

So I think we have to understand the discourse about "bilingual
education" at all levels - such as, (a) the distinctions savvy educators
and researchers can all agree on that we wish others also understood,
(b) the reality of how programs are bureaucratically and legislatively
chunked, e.g., with both bilingual and ESL/ESOL programs often falling
under the auspices of "Offices of Bilingual Education" (though we are
getting better at this and people are referring more and more to
"services for English Language Learners" without identifying the offices
with the "bilingual education" moniker); and (c) the too often general
perception that all English Language Learners' who are in special
programs are in "bilingual programs", regardless of whether those
programs, are, in fact, bilingual.

It was, in part, the failure of the general public in California to be
able to make these distinctions that helped the Unz anti-bilingual
initiative succeed (the other part, of course is that some of the voting
public simply didn't care and would vote for anything they feel promotes
an English-Only agenda).

But, from what I can see working on the ground with educators in NYC
now, a good number of people on the East Coast still have beliefs about
what "bilingual education" is that include believing that ESL/ESOL
programs are "bilingual education programs", at least they seem to lump
them together when they share their views on "bilingual education".

Just an observation.

In Peace,
K.